Recent years have seen a speedup and a dramatic increase in channel capacity in radio communications, and applications applied to radio communication technologies have been also diversifying. Particularly, radio video transmission which was difficult to be implemented because radio channel capacity was insufficient has been spread in the form of video streaming services provided for mobile terminals, and in the form of transmission between a large screen flat TV and a tuner.
However, there are still many technological problems in using radio communications. Compared with cable communications, radio communications have bad transmission quality, and therefore various technical improvements have been made in order to compensate for the bad transmission quality. For example, a technology of adding an error correcting code to improve the resistance to errors, and a technology of carrying out retransmission control at the time of occurrence of errors are known. While these technologies can reduce the occurrence of transmission errors, a problem with the technologies is that from the viewpoint of the whole communication system, the addition of error correcting codes causes a reduction in the transmission throughput resulting from an increase in the overhead and the retransmission control causes an increase in the transmission delay resulting from the buffering control.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problem, for example, a radio communication device which, in order to guarantee the real-time nature of data, such as a video image, in radio packet communications (i.e., to reduce a transmission delay), transfers a packet required for image reproduction to a higher-level application without discarding the packet even if the packet has an error to suppress the disorder of the video image by using the error compensation of a decoder for image reproduction is known conventionally (for example, refer to patent reference 1).
Furthermore, a communication device which carries out retransmission control, which is based on a packet transmission error in a communication network, in advance regardless of the presence or absence of a transmission error in order to reduce a transmission delay which occurs due to the retransmission control is also known (for example, refer to patent reference 2).